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Constantine: The Hellblazer #4 Review and *SPOILERS*

Give Up The Ghost

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

As we've all seen from this series, Constantine has himself a ghost problem, but probably more important, he has a ghosts getting killed around him problem. Yeah, it's a little weird, but you'd imagine from all the people that John has fucked over or sacrificed to come out on top, some mofo's are going to be haunting his ass. For whatever reason though, John has attracted the attention of something dark and twisted that has the ability to actually kill ghosts and after Gaz died for a second time, Constantine hopped a flight to dear old London to get to the bottom of his problem. After contacting an old friend named Georgiana, who just happens to be the supernatural specialist of England, our brash Brit finds out that a woman that he used to care for and got into magic with along with Georgie and Gaz died a couple of years earlier. So not much on the ghost front, but I'm sure that John's going to be dealing with a lot more than that this issue. Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

This retrospective booze fueled issue sees Constantine seemingly giving up on....... well, everything. He's walking through London drunk off his ass as we hop back in his life to see what was going down with him and Veronica when they first started their path to the more mystical side of life. This is a really good story, but the artistic choice to litter the flashback scenes with cluttered polaroid pictures and drivers licenses may have looked cool, but I spent my time reading this book looking back thinking that I missed something and that more was going on in this book than it actually was...... I'm sure many folks loved this addition, but for me it only hurt the progression of the story......even though it would ultimately make sense in the end, it took me longer to get there because I was backtracking so much. With those small gripes aside, I did love this story though and I did dig the art more than I did in the previous issue........... but I still can't wait for Riley Rossmo to be back for issue #6.

We find out in this story that once John and Veronica started getting in deep with the magic that Veronica wasn't able to cope with it as well as John and that became really apparent when she began falling through the cracks in reality. The more they experimented, the more that the "real" world forgot who she was and she realized when she tried to call home and her parents didn't really remember her that it was time to call it quits. Obviously, John being all high on himself about how well he was taking to magic, not to mention the new avenues of debauchery it was opening up, threw Veronica to the side if she wasn't able to hang like the rest of the cool kids. It's really sad though because this whole scene really felt as if Veronica was coming to John to tell him she was pregnant and John being like that's your problem and I don't want to deal with it....... Obviously, that's not what's going on here, but there are similarities.

In the end, we see John completely give up as he checks out some of his old haunts before serving up his ghosts to the monster pretty much on a platter. After what we saw Gaz go through in the second issue, this act really made me hate John...... more than we're already supposed to and I don't want to hate John. I want him to be a dick, we have some laughs and at the end of the day I know that for all his faults I can trust him to do something that resembles the right thing......... which he kind of does when he then offers himself up to the monster as his final surrender. When the monster comes though, we all get a great shock when we find out that the monster is actually some part of Veronica, who took her own life a handful of years earlier.

That's it for this issue of Constantine: Hellblazer and while I hated seeing John give up on his ghosts the way he did after traveling to London to come up with a plan to keep them all ecto-plasm-y safe, this really turned out to be a good story. On what could be the last day of John Constantine's life, we get a great back and forth to the things that brought him to the place where he's willing to surrender. I had a few problems with the way that the art was presented due to me thinking that it meant more than it did, but overall it was a cool artistic choice and as long as you don't get wild thoughts in your head that there's more to this than what the creators are actually telling us, I think you'll be alright and enjoy this issue for exactly what it is........ a interesting look at the shit bag that Constantine is, presented with really cool art all the way through. Anyway, for all this jibber jabber it all comes down to me really looking forward to the next issue.

Bits and Pieces:
Come take a walk down memory lane with our brash Brit as he comes to terms with the things that he's done that have left him the selfish son of a bitch that we all know him to be. This is a pretty cool story going back through John's life as we've been seeing this book do lately and it's presented to us with some interesting art that really makes you want to continue your journey down John's ghost killing rabbit hole.

1 comment:

I really couldn't run around recommending it, but I do like this title. I'd say the art does a full sixty percent of the legwork. I like the way Constantine is characterized, I like the whole feel of his world, but it seems like he's just walking around in every issue doing nothing. Still, for three bucks an issue it's pretty solid

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